And another one. In the mid-nineties I wrote a shipping label program. The courier supplied fanfold labels on carbon paper, all sequentially numbered, and the user had to enter the first number from the batch when the printing finished. The program would add the shipping label count, and ask ...

Is the final number 'x'?

To which the user would click Yes.

I threw an error message in there and never thought about it again, but one day the printer jammed, the user tore off a label and continued printing, and then at the end they clicked 'NO'.

Up pops the error message: Well, you're screwed then, aren't you?

That user was my mother.

Back in the early nineties I worked in an electronics store, selling PCs to home and business users. (286, 386 era).

A tech in the repair department leant me a disk with a pixellated clip on it of a woman giving a guy a blow job. I think the clip lasted about 3 seconds. Pretty tame these days, but it was all new back then.

At that time we had one of the latest-model colour laptops on display, a 386SX with a sticker price of AUD$12,999. Naturally, I displayed the video on that, since it had the best screen in the place.

Fast-forward to the next day, and my boss called me in. He'd loaned the laptop to a wealthy potential customer overnight, and I'd left the floppy disk in the machine...

The customer was understanding about it. My boss was understanding about it. That made me feel worse because I took my job really seriously.

Just wait until you read up on Brazil nuts.

It's coming. You know it is. An IP address for life, used on everything from passports to currency transactions.

I switched to Affinity Publisher, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer just a few weeks ago. I'd been using Indesign 5.5 and Photoshop Elements 9.0 for years before that, after giving up trying to get CorelDraw 12 running reliably on Windows 10. (I first used CorelDraw 2.0 in the Windows 3.11 days, and then Corel 5, 7 and 9 in the years since.)

Long story short, Affinity is a one-time purchase, it was 50% off when I got it, and cost me around $100 australian for all three packages. It will import IDML from Indesign and works with PSD files, including PSD layer masks which I've never got to load and display properly in Gimp or Krita.

Bringing in the older generation too. I'm 53 and I've been driving sims of one kind of another since the late 80's, but never online. (Dial-up wasn't suitable, and early Aussie broadband was woeful.)

I did race in a couple of online events in Grand Prix Legends (Papyrus), but the lag was immense.

I've always been keen on simulators, but only against AI - and there's not much excitement racing against robotic, pre-programmed opponents.

Fast forward to early 2020 and I finally gave iRacing a shot. I already had an old Logitech G25 wheel, pedals and shifter, and the same day I started using it in the sim... the wheel burned out. Replaced it with a G29, and since then I've completed in close to 900 road races, with more than 11,000 laps turned. I qualified for my A-class license in the first 3 weeks, and I drive in most of the available series.

Thing is, in real life I drive a Subaru WRX which I bought brand new in 1988. It's a car which begs for track days, but I've only taken it to one event. It took an entire day, lots of $$$ for a helmet, fire extinguisher, event fees, etc, and I only got a handful of laps - maybe 15 mins car time.

Yesterday I ran a dozen races in iRacing, from Aussie V8s to Rookie Mazdas, and the excitement was 10x higher than driving around an empty track in my real car. Last year I drove in the Bathurst 1000 with a team mate, a 7-hour event that went on 'til 4am in my time zone. We came fourth overall, from a starting position of 13th, and it felt like one of the best achievements of my life. (And several of my novels have been traditionally published, which is hard to beat.)

The other thing with sim-racing was seeing retired legends from various series competing again. That was really special, and far more interesting than the current Formula One snoozefest.

I spent 6 months driving online in iRacing, and 2 months writing two novels. A fair balance.

To be fair, we spend most of our time indoors in Australia. Go out the front door and the sun burns you red in under ten minutes, and if the spiders and snakes don't get you it'll be a buff kangaroo or a drop bear.

I picked up a Core 2 duo PC for $20 recently, mostly for use as a legacy gaming PC. I added an old GTX560 I had lying around, and installed Ubuntu and then Steam. I'm planning on installing some older games which don't play nice on Win 10, but will hopefully always work on Linux.

I already have two Windows XP machines with really old CD-based stuff on, like Interstate '76. (The Gog version still doesn't work properly.) This new machine is just for games which fall into the gap between CD-based XP gaming and Win 10+

Above all else, I don't want a car with connectivity. I'm still driving the one I bought 22 years ago and I hope it'll last another 22.

I used to offer a 7 day free trial for one of my software apps. People would start with xyz1@freemailprovider.whatever and just go through xyz2, xyz3 and so on, for month after month. I blocked some IP addresses now and then, but in the end I ditched the free trial.

Someone ought to time travel back to the early sixties and create an ongoing TV show which prepares the population of Earth for the concept of time travel.

They could call it Doctor When or something snappy along those lines, and then explain this same line of research in, like, four hundred plus episodes over the next sixty years.

Because, you know, without a show like that we'd have to come up with shiny new research on the topic.

I'm on my third smartphone (second-hand Galaxy A5 received from a friend who upgraded in return for installing his garage door opener). About 8-12 months so far, running just fine.
Before that I had a refurbished LG G3 which developed all kinds of system/software problems and basically became unusable. Partly due to Android software getting bigger and bigger until there was no room on the phone for anything else. (5 years?).
Before that a new-but-already-obsolete pocket-sized LG 700-something which was great until Android updates rendered it as slow as a Windows XP machine running Crysis. (3 years?)

I'm not big on cell phones, which I see as a necessary evil. Then again, I'm not big on laptops either - I like my computing power in a nice roomy tower with 3 or more screens.

As per the title, I'm slowly making my way through the various Star Trek series on Netflix (although I haven't watched TOS yet). Watched all of Longmire recently as well. I'm also playing Satisfactory while I watch TV shows, which is a sweet keep-me-busy title. But most of the time, it's iRacing. And programming.

I'm still driving my 1998 (MY99) Impreza WRX. It has 160,000km/100k miles on the clock, despite being almost 22 years old, and my plan is to convert it to electric maybe a decade from now. You know, when the last gas stations are being converted to shops/commercial space/housing.

As for charging points, I'll get one installed at home, along with a powerwall to go with my solar panels. The shops are 3km away so I don't exactly need a charge point there. In fact, I usually ride a bicycle to the shops anyway. (Or my home-built ebike, if I'm feeling lazy).